Removing the academic framing in student evaluations improves achievement in children with dyslexia: The mediating role of self-judgement of competence

Self-judgement is known to play a crucial role in academic achievement, and as such, may be expected to have an impact on students with dyslexia. Their self-judgements may reflect the negative stereotype of low competence that targets people with disabilities. Their repeated academic failures may lead to a negative association between “school” and “failure”. The aim of the present study was to investigate how such factors contribute to academic failure in students with dyslexia. Participants were 183 French middle school students. We assessed students' self-judgement and manipulated the framing of performance tasks so that students completed literacy tasks in both academic and non-academic forms. We expected a detrimental impact of dyslexia on performance in academic but not in non-academic tasks. We also expected self-judgement to account for this difference. Students with dyslexia perceive themselves as less competent than students without dyslexia. Significantly, structural equation modeling revealed that students with dyslexia performed poorly in academic tasks, compared to students without dyslexia. This difference no longer appeared in non-academic tasks. Self-judgement of competence is a predictor of the performance of students with and without dyslexia at school and their impact is related to how the academic features of the tasks are emphasized.